1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates generally to use of thermal management. Still more particularly, the present application relates to a computer implemented method, data processing system, and processor for thermal throttling control for testing of real-time software.
2. Description of the Related Art
The first-generation heterogeneous Cell Broadband Engine™ (BE) processor is a multi-core chip comprised of a 64-bit Power PC® processor core and eight single instruction multiple data (SIMD) synergistic processor cores, capable of massive floating point processing, optimized for compute-intensive workloads and broadband rich media applications. A high-speed memory controller and high-bandwidth bus interface are also integrated on-chip. Cell BE's breakthrough multi-core architecture and ultra high-speed communicating capabilities deliver vastly improved, real-time response, in many cases ten times the performance of the latest PC processors. Cell BE is operating system neutral and supports multiple operating systems simultaneously. Applications for this type of processor range from a next generation of game systems with dramatically enhanced realism, to systems that form the hub for digital media and streaming content in the home, to systems used to develop and distribute digital content, and to systems to accelerate visualization and supercomputing applications.
Today's multi-core processors are frequently limited by thermal considerations. Typical solutions include cooling and power management. Cooling may be expensive and/or difficult to package. Power management is generally a coarse action, “throttling” much if not all of the processor in reaction to a thermal limit being reached. Other techniques such as thermal management help address these coarse actions by only throttling the units exceeding a given temperature. However, most thermal management techniques impact the real-time guarantees of an application. Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide a thermal management solution which provides a processor with a method to guarantee the real-time nature of an application even in the event of a thermal condition which requires throttling of the processor. In the cases where the real-time guarantees can not be met, the application administrator is notified so that a corrective action can be implemented.